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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#61

Post by patrickk »

JshWright wrote: post #5

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got the idea from the excellent book "Why We Sleep"[1]. It's possible that a similar HA project already exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#62

Post by bonestamp2 »

JshWright wrote: post #5

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

I use a lot of automation around my house too. I noticed that my wife and kids tend to leave certain lights on frequently, so I replaced them with motion sensor switches that automatically turn on/off the lights. Having them turn on the lights became a very nice feature.

I also have all the outside lights on wifi light switches that turn on automatically at dusk. There are a few lamps inside that turn on automatically too, so it looks like someone is home and so it automatically creates a nice ambiance when we are home.

The lamps also happen to use RGB Hue bulbs, so they're normally a white shade, but if one of the outside motion sensors (also Hue) is triggered, then they turn red, and if it's late enough that the outdoor lights are off, then it automatically triggers the wifi light switches to turn on all the outside lights.

Amazon echo show is great for checking cameras. Logitech harmony remote is great for starting up the tv/media box/amplifier and configuring them to their correct settings each time someone wants to watch tv. The automatic refill kit for the keurig keeps the water tank full. myQ lets me know if one of my garage doors was left open. A wemo plug turns on my hot water circulator during the hours when we're usually home and off when we're not. Nest camera lets me know when it spots a person on my driveway.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#63

Post by bonestamp2 »

patrickk wrote: post #61
JshWright wrote: post #5

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

Look into philips hue. You can set the lights so they turn on at a different color temperature depending on time of day. Some of the remotes/switches even come pre-programmed to do that right out of the box.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#64

Post by stevejb »

someguydave wrote: post #35
iKlsR wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are are custom built from apis but I daresay you can find just about anything to hit a webhook or integrate into slack or elsewhere nowadays. Some examples are https://littlebirdie.io/ I use to filter hackernews, Zapier for RSS & filtering feeds, google calendar etc, nothing complicated, just know what you need from a specific service then figure out a way to get it to yourself in a recurring distraction free ma…

Wait isn’t having a bot send you notifications all day the opposite of “distraction free”?

Not OP, but I think that the idea is that if a notification makes it through the system, it has been filtered to be worthy of distraction. So, there isn't a cognitive cost to the user of "is the notification worth reading" since it has already been determined to be that way.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#65

Post by huseyinkeles »

patrickk wrote: post #61
JshWright wrote: post #5

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

I use Circadian Lighting [0] component for this one. Works pretty well all around the house.

[0] - https://community.home-assistant.io/t/circadian-lighting-cus...

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#66

Post by patrickk »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #63
patrickk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

Look into philips hue. You can set the lights so they turn on at a different color temperature depending on time of day. Some of the remotes/switches even come pre-programmed to do that right out of the box.

Good to know thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#67

Post by clement_b »

patrickk wrote: post #57
clement_b wrote: post #47

Probably off initial topic, but: - FileJuggler on Windows, to automatically clean Desktop, Download folder and archive everything into a date-based folder structure in Drive. - AutoHotKey to insert text templates into everything (e.g. current date, formatted Jira issues, annoying things to type) The problem with automation is that one will want to break even quickly [time saved > (time spent finding/setting/maintaini…

Some more items that I've setup in AHK: - Launching commonly used apps, like Notepad, Windows Explorer or Sublime Text - Launching commonly used websites in a browser, e.g. gmail - Paste from the clipboard into a language translation site (languageX to languageY via URL parameters) - Open a to do list in Excel (hard coded file path) - Text expansion for personal and work email addresses - With one keypress, open the…

> Text expand to symbols that I always forget, eg. euro symbol, hash sign etc

Yes! That's a big time saver on my end to.

I was also using it to insert emojis, but the new `Windows+.` shortcut is actually useful for that.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#68

Post by sbergot »

lostintangent wrote: post #12

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Thanks for the heads up! Selenium tests flakiness is definitely a big pain for us. I am also a big fan of the puppeteer api. We will check it out.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#69

Post by theshadowmonkey »

What about headless chrome and some cron jobs to run tasks for you. It'd be similar to selenium. But, on a headless browser. There are also some scraping services that let you get data on a set interval with a phantomjs scraper. I have one that uses apify and then notifies a zapier hook on success and then zapier posts to my google sheet. My webapp then calls a GCP instance REST API endpoint which internally calls the google spreadsheet through an exposed api, cleans the data and sends back to the webapp.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#70

Post by patrickk »

huseyinkeles wrote: post #65
patrickk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

I use Circadian Lighting [0] component for this one. Works pretty well all around the house. [0] - https://community.home-assistant.io/t/circadian-lighting-cus...

Wow, very nice. This looks like exactly what I had in mind.
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